We recommend that you set the default minimum password strength to at least 50.

Enable cPHullk

cPHulk provides protection for your server against brute force attacks (a hacking method that uses an automated system to guess passwords). If you enable cPHulk, you can decrease the chance that a hacker can use a brute force attack to gain access to your server's mail accounts.

Tweak Settings

The following settings in the Mail section of WHM's Tweak Settings interface (WHM >> Home >> Server Configuration >> Tweak Settings) can help to prevent email abuse:

If you set the Max hourly emails per domain option to 500, this allows each of the domains that you host to send 500 email messages per hour. For example, a domain uses a mailing list with 500 members. If this domain sends a message to the mailing list, then sends another email message in the same hour, the domain will exceed the Max hourly emails per domain limit.

Use the The percentage of email messages (above the account’s hourly maximum) to queue and retry for delivery setting to specify a "soft limit." For example, if you set the The percentage of email messages (above the account’s hourly maximum) to queue and retry for delivery value to 150, the domain can queue up to 250 messages to send in the next hour. In this scenario, the domain can queue the additional 25 email messages in the next hour.

The system only enforces email send limits on remote email deliveries.

To prevent email abuse, we recommend that you specify a value that is notUnlimited.

Account-specific Max hourly emails per domain settings

Use WHM'sEdit a Packageinterface (WHM >> Home >> Packages >> Edit a Package) or WHM'sModify an Accountinterface (WHM >> Home >> Account Functions >> Modify an Account) to specify values for an individual package or an individual account.

To enable this setting from the command line, you must perform the following steps to manually edit the cpuser file:

From the command line, open the /var/cpanel/users/username file, where username represents the desired account username.

In this file, add the MAX_EMAIL_PER_HOUR key and specify the value for the selected username:

MAX_EMAIL_PER_HOUR=500

Run the /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/updateuserdomains script.

To prevent email abuse, we recommend that you select On.

PHP configuration

Do not enable suEXEC with ModRuid2. suEXEC is not compatible with this module.

If you configure PHP and suEXEC, ModRuid2, or suPHP, you can improve server security. This configuration allows you to know which users run which processes system-wide.

ModRuid2 and suPHP force CGI applications to run as the cPanel account user. In addition, ModRuid2 exploits some of the POSIX.1e capabilities in order to provide some performance enhancements over Apache's default suEXEC configuration.

The suEXEC Apache module forces CGI and PHP applications to run as the cPanel account user. For instructions to enable suEXEC, read our Configure PHP and suEXEC documentation.

Experimental: Rewrite From: header to match actual sender

Any local cPanel user can use the 127.0.0.1 IP address to send mail without authentication. This can make it difficult for system administrators to determine which cPanel account sent the mail, especially when a malicious user spoofs an email address to disguise the origin of the email.

The actual_sender portion of the log entry shows that spammer is the cPanel account that sent the email. This information allows the system administrator to take action against the account to prevent additional spam.